Cloud, Containers, and Microservices

W24 An Infrastructure as Code Bake-off, Comparing ARM, Terraform, and Bicep

05/17/2023

4:00pm - 5:15pm

Level: Intermediate

Mike Benkovich

Developer, Business Owner, Consultant, Cloud Architect, Microsoft Azure MVP and an Online Instructor

Infrastructure as Code comes in many flavors, and the Azure Cloud's default deployment templates work with Azure Resource Manager (ARM) to define and deploy infrastructure. Working with the JSON format of ARM can be challenging, but Microsoft has introduced a language processor called Bicep which generates ARM as output. At the same time there are other options, including scripting tools, Terraform, Pulumi, Ansible and others. In this session, we'll compare creating infrastructure using ARM, Terraform and Bicep, and compare pros and cons to each.

You will learn:

  • What is Bicep and how is it related to ARM
  • How does Terraform work and compare to ARM and Bicep
  • What other tools are out there and how do they compare